Aaron’s gave me the CD with the anti-virus and I installed it, but as soon as I realized it wouldn’t let me get to my banking sites, I tried to uninstall it and that’s when the fun began.
If I lose everything, that’s fine, as I can reinstall it all. Right now, I’m using Avast, Ad-aware and Ghostery and they seem to be doing a good job with the tracking cookies and other nasty things.
Lacking a further solution, I will go through the steps you listed and see what’s there.
HP PCs - Performing an HP system recovery (Windows 8)
They call their thingie "Recovery Manager".